Antony Beevor's Blog, page 4

Antony Meets Sophie Ter Horst

Antony with Sophie Ter Horst in the Ter Horst house, outside which stands the monument to the British soldiers who died in the dressing station and were buried there in the garden.

Arnhem Dutch Edition Launch

On Monday 23 April the Dutch edition was launched with the Mayor of Arnhem Ahmed Marcouch in the St Eusebius Grote Kerk.

Closing Keynote at the ECTR Conference

The European Centre for Tolerance and Reconciliation Conference, Monte Carlo, 6 March 2018

This has been a fascinating round table and I would not have missed it for anything. So I would like to express my thanks to Dr Kantor and the organisers, and of course to all the contributors who have given us so much to think about.

When summing up, as I have been asked to do, rather than give a precis of what we have just heard, I think it would be better to highlight some of the excellent points which have been made, and look at them within the wider background.

We have heard how across Europe, the political centre is on the back foot. Unfortunately, in a time of upheaval, arguments in favour of the liberal democratic status quo will appear to have nothing new to offer.  Britain certainly found this in the referendum campaign on membership of the European Union. But another significant element emerged. It was the dominant role of the hard right, both UKIP and Conservative Party Brexiteers, which in fact gave the hard left of Momentum the chance to seize power in the Labour Party, as some of its members have gleefully acknowledged. As soon as a process of polarisation develops, the extremes find it easy to outflank the majority in the centre.

But before anything else, it is absolutely essential that we first understand clearly where all this hate comes from. We need to examine the origins of group hatred in Europe. Does it come from atavistic legends, or from a combination of present frustration and fear of the future? Do those fears have some basis in truth, or are they totally irrational?

The basic point surely is that there is only so much change – demographic, ethnic, cultural, economic, technological and so forth – which any society can hope to absorb and adapt to in a short time. And the transformation of our societies which we are experiencing has come upon us very suddenly.

We have indeed entered a new era. After Donald Trump’s surprise victory shook the world, we found ourselves in what the Pentagon already called “the new normal”. The conventional rules of politics no longer applied along with the conventional rules of warfare. The overwhelming consensus of the political establishment and the traditional media in the United States could no longer predict electoral success, rather as even an overwhelming military victory can no longer bring peace.

The real origins of our present problems, however, go back to the extraordinary revolution of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The great geo-political change with the end of the Cold War happened to coincide with many others – the communications revolution, the invention of the internet and the mobile telephone; economic liberalisation, the abolition of exchange controls, and banking’s big Bang. All these led to the onset of globalisation. Raw materials, finished products and above all cheap labour suddenly became accessible almost anywhere in the world. Although often improving living standards in the developing world, globalisation has adversely affected the incomes and job security of workers, both blue and white collar, in most advanced economies.

Few of us really understood at the time the consequences of what was happening. It all seemed rather exciting then. But it was not long before we began to notice the fragmentation of collective or tribal loyalties. Trades unions, religious organisations, traditional political parties, and other associations all began to decline. The emphasis had shifted to the individual rather than the group or community. A growing scepticism towards authority led to a much less deferential society. The press especially became far more critical of traditional hierarchy and especially of politicians. But fragmentation and uncertainty also produce a contrary reaction in people. They prompt a need to associate only with those who share similar values and beliefs. This development of introspective enclaves is true of immigrant communities as well as indigenous ones.

Above all, we failed to foresee the all-consuming dynamics of globalisation. Beyond the effective control of governments, multi-national companies could move both profits and tax liabilities around in a game of find-the-lady. They could also ‘out-source’ their manufacturing base to where labour costs and light regulation were most attractive to them. Corporations could thus become fiscal nomads, ignoring borders and national loyalties. As true multi-nationals they no longer needed to pay lip service to patriotism. Their allegiance was only to themselves. This was bound to provoke a nationalistic reaction among those excluded from economic success and who suffered during the economic crisis and austerity which started ten years ago. All the while, any pretence by politicians that they could control events became correspondingly less convincing.

Already before we see the full onset of robotisation, turbo-charged, corporate machines, have been  producing huge profits for the fortunate, while drastically reducing the job security and spending power of both workers and administrative staff. The most extreme examples are the so-called ‘gig’ economy and zero-hour contracts. Globalisation has intensified price and service competition to an almost insane pitch, so labour and supplier costs have to be crushed to a minimum. Look at the latest row in France over whether supermarkets are beggaring producers by their cost-cutting rivalry.

Already in the United States and Britain, the race to reduce costs has severely disadvantaged the less-skilled, and also an increasing proportion of the middle class, whose disposable income has declined dramatically. They are less and less able to afford the products and services on offer. This, of course, is a major factor in the economic stagnation we have started to experience in the West. Globalised capitalism, while kick-starting production output and sales in large parts of the developing world, is in fact cutting its own throat in much of what used to be called the First World.

The political consequences are of course immense. In the past, traditional capitalism could justify its inherent inequalities on the grounds that at least it made the lower paid slightly better off. That is patently no longer the case, and the inequalities are now perceived as far more acute. At the end of the 20th Century and the very beginning of the 21st, the low inflation boom years contributed to an ideological vacuum. That has now changed very abruptly, with the rise of extremism on both the left and the right, which produces its own form of polarisation.

The uncertainties caused by social fragmentation over the last quarter century have naturally been exacerbated by unprecedented waves of international migration.  They have been triggered by conflict in the Middle East and Africa, the effects of climate change, and of over-population, but also by the revolution in communications, with mobile telephones and internet. The way quasi-fascists conducted the election campaign in Italy over the last few weeks indicate a danger of social unrest in the near future. Promises to dump 600,000 refugees back on the southern shores of the Mediterranean are both incendiary as well as impracticable.

In Europe, hatred for other ethnic or religious groups, has been ramped up, especially among a significant minority of the young. This has been achieved through social media by what can only be described as weaponised disinformation. During the recent row over Poland’s Law and Justice Party’s attempt to criminalise any suggestion of a link between Poles and the Holocaust, I was struck by a study carried out by Warsaw University which showed that the rise of anti-semitism in Poland among the young is strongly linked to a rise in Islamophobia.

We should learn from History while at the same time recognising that it never repeats itself, even if it at times it may echo or rhyme. If we look back to 1942, almost certainly the worst period of hate during the last century as Dr Kantor has observed, we see the dehumanisation of the ‘enemy’ – both external and internal – reach new extremes. The diabolical genius of Josef Goebbels was to recognise that hatred alone was not enough. The way to make hatred truly explosive was to combine it with fear. I also learned when researching my history of the Spanish Civil War that men in societies with a strong macho culture, have to suppress their fear, and the very act of suppressing fear makes it far more violent when it bursts forth.

Fear and resentment also create a refusal to listen to and acknowledge the views of others. Social media, supposedly providing the great vehicles of free speech, have actually produced a contrary effect. They have created echo chambers which simply reinforce existing prejudices. We have been witnessing a dialogue of the deaf in the United States, in Britain, and in nationalist politics in Europe.

The internet produced another similar paradox soon after the collapse of Communism. Individuals, although supposedly liberated from collectivism, with every form of information at their fingertips, can also become more credulous. In an age of identity politics, the sinister slogan of the Scientologists in America – ‘If it’s true for you, then it’s true’ – has spread like a virus, distorting the perception of its victims. Conspiracy theories have always existed, but now linked up through internet communication they can take on a completely different strength and momentum. Isolation in the new mass society makes people far more vulnerable to the charlatan and false prophet. I don’t know how many of you saw the internet movie ‘Loose Change’. Through the selection of news clips, deliberately taken out of context, the four young Americans behind it, made the Bush administration out to be the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. They claimed it was all a false flag operation to justify the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. ‘Loose Change’ has been seen by millions of people, and most Muslims and Russians are convinced that its basic premise is true.  We have even seen national governments paying for feature films to turn untrue myths into ‘cinematic fact’. The Kremlin financed a film about the invented heroism in the Battle of Moscow of ‘Panfilov and his 28 Men’, while the Law and Justice Party in Poland financed a film dramatising its own version of what happened in the Smolensk plane crash in April 2010.

The confusion between fact and fiction is made worse by an international entertainment industry able through computer generated imagery to create its own false visions. More and more people have an increasing difficulty, distinguishing between fiction and truth, and between fantasy and reality.  Borders between the two are being relentlessly and deliberately eroded, mainly because of the huge commercial potential. We are entering a post-literate world where the moving image is king. This is, of course, profoundly corrupting in historical terms. We have recently been seeing ‘faction-creep’ both in documentary and feature films. The danger is that ‘entertainment history’ provides most people’s perceptions of the past.

Anthropologists now study how politics and even human relationships are being changed by the internet, and especially by social networking sites. Facebook alone has more than two billion active members, of whom more than half log on every day. Smartphone users apparently check Facebook fourteen times a day. On average members have 130 ‘friends’. But what sort of friendship can that represent? A recent study revealed that there has been a huge increase in mental problems among young women especially, because they are made to feel inadequate by social media. It is another striking paradox that nothing can be more isolating than the internet, the greatest communications invention of all time.

Parliamentary democracy, which should be the political guarantor of tolerance and reconciliation, can only survive through a basic respect for verifiable truth. But this is not easy when people believe that truth itself has been democratised down to the level of the individual – that same mantra ‘If you believe it’s true, then it’s true.’  And predictably, these beliefs tend to be negative ones, forming an Opferkult – a cult of the victim.  They are convinced that the powers that be – the elite – are just out to do the little people down.

Intellectual honesty is the first casualty of moral outrage. And what we have started to see over the last few years is an incoherent moral outrage fuelled by fear and incomprehension. An easily identifiable culprit must be found, so it has to be a foreigner, a stranger, an outsider. At the same time, liberal democracy is blamed for being not merely weak, but for acting as a form of appeasement to multi-culturalism, which is seen as a deliberate betrayal of national values. The majority of the poorer electors in Britain who voted to leave the European Union, were in fact trying to blame Brussels for the effects of globalisation and mass immigration. That was why the slogan of the Leave campaign: ‘Take Back Control’, proved so effective. It was a shamelessly dishonest promise, and the Remain campaign found nothing to counter it with. Defence of an awkward status quo, with widely acknowledged faults, can never inspire devotion.

Demagogues and their acolytes sometimes even imitate that Stalinist tactic: the bigger the lie, the more people are likely to believe it, if only because they cannot imagine that anyone could invent such an outrageous falsehood. These deliberate attempts to polarise all arguments allow the extremes to feed off each other, creating false alternatives, as we saw in the 1930s. No poem was more prophetic than W.B.Yeats’s The Second Coming written in 1919.

 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Both democracy and the cause of tolerance can never afford to ‘lack all conviction’. They must do everything in their power to confront the ‘passionate intensity’ of religious, racial or political fanaticism. The power of tyrants has always been based on the old tactic of divide and rule. They focus fear and hatred against minorities, and thus away from their own crimes. And they come to power by provoking violent social disorder so that people long for a strong-man to take over. Thus the cause of democracy is the cause of tolerance.

The purpose of the European Centre for Tolerance and Reconcilioation is to fight intolerance with active measures, and the Kantor Prize for Secure Tolerance is designed to encourage the development of strategies and practical measures to achieve this. In the course of the round table we have heard a number of recommendations.

– the need to impose zero tolerance for violence

– the need to confront illiberal practices, such as female genital mutilation, polygamy and the suppression of the rights of women or anyone else.

– the need to combat a misuse of religion, by getting religious leaders to condemn as blasphemy all calls to violence in the name of God.

– the need to end or at least marginalise the use of anonymity in internet exchanges, especially on social media.

–  to redefine Hate or Harmful Speech to fit a legislative framework.

– to re-examine and update the declaration on human rights.

– to force internet platforms to face up to their responsibilities by providing effective controls on hate material, and encourage them and the public to treat terrorist incitement to violence group and abuse in a comparable way to child pornography.

 

In all these cases, international co-operation is required and that is why an international group like the ECTR is so important if real results are to be achieved.

 

Listen to Antony on Desert Island Discs

On Sunday 19 February Antony appeared on Desert Island Discs with Kirsty Young

Antony Beevor Receives Knighthood

On Friday 17 February Antony Beevor was knighted at Buckingham Palace. Beevor’s honour was awarded “for services in support of Armed Forces Professional Development”

Antony discusses The Second World War

FiveBooks Interviews: Antony Beevor on World War II The author of Stalingrad and Berlin tells us about five key works on the Second World War, from the War and Peace of the 20th century to superlative accounts of Hitler and the atrocities of Stalin.

On Development and Freedom: A Conversation on the Human Prospect

Antony Beevor interview – Foundation Francisco Manuel dos Santos.

Saturday 14 September

Another hot day without a cloud in the sky. I finally met up with Mark Mazower shortly before our midday event, but it was all too brief to hear his news since the last time we had seen each other. António Costa Pinto was to be our moderador. I was to go first, as he had suggested in an e-mail. My talk focused on the false thinking and false arguments in European unification, and on the confusion of cause and effect. The recent rise in nationalism was due to the very process of unification which left people feeling ignored by their own politicians and above all by the bureaucrats in Brussels. It was not the European Union which had prevented war in Europe, it was democracy. And the democratic deficit in the EU was what could lead to conflict. I also spoke about the Euro crisis as the ‘longest train-crash in history’ and the tragedy for southern Europe. Mark took a much more conventional approach, talking of the origins of European culture and identity. He too regarded the Euro as disastrous and, as someone who knows Greece very well, felt passionate about the wrecking of young lives. The questions were good. One addressed to me by, as it turned out, António Barreto’s wife, Maria Filomena Mónica, was that although she agreed with all I had to say about the Euro crisis, she wondered whether Euroscepticism was the privilige of a rich nation. It was a very pertinent question and I had to think about it. I found myself sitting next to her at lunch.  We talked about Tuscany and she told me about Prato, where the Chinese have taken over all the ancient warehouses and factories to turn them into clothing sweatshops, with all the forced labour brought in from China.

At three I did an ‘in conversation’ with Fernanda Freitas, a beautiful television journalist who is a great character full of amusing charm. She kept her questions short so that the audience could have their turn. One of them had been pained by my quoting the EU commissioner for industry who said a week ago that Europe was facing ‘an industrial massacre’ because of the high cost of energy, mainly due to the EU insistence on renewable energy. He felt that Europe should take a moral lead over global warming. I entirely accepted his point, but observed that the Kyoto agreement was dead, and that if Europe turned aside from nuclear energy and fracking, then the EU would never be able to compete. Even Herman van Rompuy acknowledged that foreign investment would all go to the US or elsewhere if EU energy prices continued to be twice as high for electricity and four times as high for gas.  In a globalized world we will be faced with more and more brutal choices of this sort. Maria Filomena was also there. She was above all interested by my comment that the European bureaucracy in Brussels had been established by some of the ‘jeunes technocrates’ from Marshal Pétain’s Vichy, but I could not remember which French historian had told me that. Just as everyone was leaving, I was buttonholed by a man who wanted to interview me about my father’s SOE role in Portugal during the war. I lost all sympathy with him as soon as he started to insist that Salazar was misunderstood, and that the dictator had always been pro-British and anti-German. I refused to listen to any more and escaped with Eduardo.

Friday 13 September

I started the day with two delightful professors of European studies from London – Anand Menon from King’s and Mark Thatcher from the LSE. I had to admit to Mark that I had been horrified to see his name on the programme, then greatly relieved to discover that I had imagined the wrong Mark Thatcher.  The conference was huge, impressively organized and a major media event. All the main TV channels and newspapers were represented, in fact there were apparently updates every few hours on national television. My interview with Diário de Notícias was published that morning over two pages and with a mug shot of me on the front page. After the introduction, Mark, Anand and I listened to the debate with Wolfgang Münchau of the FT. He, of course, was excellent, but then there was an appalling clown of a Portuguese MEP who said that political power had transferred to Brussels and that we should regard that as perfectly normal. Mark and I shook our heads in disbelief. The Portuguese are far too well-mannered. I would have been throwing tomatoes if there had been any to hand. I then had to go off, escorted by extremely good-looking and competent young women, for a series of media interviews – press, radio and TV. In all there were nine, including a press conference and a one hour interview for a TV documentary entitled ‘On Development and Freedom’, which was being filmed over a long period of time by José Tavares. I was exhausted by the end and felt slightly shaky. The cameraman took pity on me, offering a perfect roll-up with the end twisted like a joint. I smoked it in the classroom corridor, puffing out of the window with the pleasure of the illicit. After I had time for yet another shower and change, Eduardo collected  took me from the hotel and we went off to dinner in the old quarter at a restaurant called La Travessa – or ‘The Tray’. It was my favourite sort of restaurant. Set in the cloisters of an old convent, the tables were well-worn marble. No starched cloths. The food was simple, but made with perfect raw materials, and absolutely delicious. The vinho verde just lifted my spirits immediately.

Thursday 12 September

I returned to King’s for the Waterloo 200 conference, then slipped away at the end of the morning to be in good time for my plane to Portugal. One of the other passengers turned out to be José dos Santos of the family which owns Jerónimo Martins, a massive food empire in Portugal and Poland. They finance the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation, which was organizing the conference. My Portuguese publisher, Eduardo Boavida, was also at the airport to meet me. He explained that we would have to postpone our dinner together as I was expected for dinner with the Jerónimo Martins sponsors.

I had just enough time at the Hotel Estrela to shower and change before being driven to the Lapa Palace where I was to be interviewed by Professor António Costa Pinto in front of a small audience. As we drove into the entrance, the driver said to me in slight awe: ‘There are all the big bosses waiting for you on the steps’. José introduced me to the patriarch and chairman Alexandre Soares dos Santos, who had set up the foundation. Many of the others, all in immaculate dark suits, were members of the family accompanied by their elegant wives. Everyone was very welcoming and charming.  António Costa Pinto started off with such a long and convoluted introduction to his first question, that I became totally lost, and wondered whether I would even get a word in edgeways. Almost all the questions were about the EU and the Euro, and seemed to be aimed at what I was going to say at the conference. During the questions, I was amazed when Alexandre dos Santos, a tall, quietly imposing man in his eighties, expressed a fear of the power of Germany. Yet I was soon to find that this was a widespread concern in Portugal.

The dinner, in a magnificently ornate dining room, was fairly simple but delicious. I sat next to the director of the foundation, Antonio Barreto, a wonderful man, with a professorial beard which was half imperial half mandarin, a dark blue polo shirt and a crumpled cream suit which rather stood out against the smart uniformity of the others and the palatial surroundings. We talked about research and archives. Since I was pretty exhausted after the last couple of days and the conference at King’s, it was a relief when Alexandre dos Santos stood up and everyone followed.